Woman Entrepreneurship in Creative Crafts: The Case of “Benim Küçük Atölyem”

Introduction

Economic and social conditions shape business opportunities, and these opportunities can be equivalently situated in high technology industries as well as traditional ones. Currently, crafts industry is going through a phase of revival, not only because of economic conditions but also due to social phenomena such as anti-commercialism, localism and sub-cultural identification (Jakob, 2013). Despite this ongoing phenomenon of the revival of the crafts industry, little has been done in business research to define or explore the “how” and “why” behind entrepreneurship in creative crafts. Some attempts to define crafts industry were done both by researchers and policy-makers alike, but little consensus has been reached on what one can define as “crafts” (Jakob, 2013). For example, (Adamson, 2009) defines crafts as “the application of skill and material-based knowledge to relatively small-scale production” (p. 3), whereas (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021) defines craft artists as those who “create or reproduce handmade objects for sale and exhibition using a variety of techniques, such as welding, weaving, pottery, and needlecraft”. Despite these definition attempts, crafts, especially creative crafts are understood in a very limited, one-sided way as research is primarily focusing on the manual skills necessary for crafts (Sennett, 2008).

In order to overcome this shortcoming in research, a new stream of research from entrepreneurial studies started to focus on the transformative role of crafts entrepreneurs and what else is required for becoming a crafts entrepreneur in creative industries other than manual skills (Floris et al., 2020; Jakob, 2013; Katre, 2020; Marques et al., 2019; Phillipov, 2016; Ratten, 2022b, 2022a; Smagina & Ludviga, 2021; Thurnell-Read, 2021; Toker & Erkut, 2022). In this sense, research highlights the process of becoming a craft entrepreneur as a complex phenomenon, being at the crossroads of utilizing knowledge from different disciplines management, creativity, arts, and economics. This chapter focuses on a specific case of creative crafts entrepreneurship to focus on why an entrepreneur decides for becoming a creative crafts entrepreneur and how she is performing it. The research is a qualitative one, combining observatory research with a literature review and interviews to explore the phenomenon of creative crafts entrepreneurship. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: First, the authors provide a review of the recent literature from the field of entrepreneurship research. Next, the authors describe their methodology. Afterwards, the authors present their findings and discuss them. Finally, a conclusion is provided, which also gives an overview of the limitations of this study together with suggesting some potential avenues for future research.